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Posted
September 17, 2003
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THEN THERE WAS NO
MOUNTAIN
A Parallel odyssey of a Mother and
Daughter through Addiction
By: Ellen Waterston
Lanham, MD:Taylor Trade:2003
Review by: Lon
Woodbury
(Available about October 1, 2003)
At first glance, this is a book about a mother
who first turned to a wilderness program, and then to an
all girls residential program to retrieve her daughter from
spinning out of control through self-destructive activity.
At a second glance it is a book about how one person’s substance
abuse can turn the lives of loved ones upside down and inside
out, requiring drastic self-exploration and extreme intervention
for the other family members to recover.
At a deeper level, it is a social commentary about the destruction
and chaos that can occur when raising children in a modern
society that supports radical individual freedoms and assumes
parents are the problem.
This story is about what can happen to a mother and daughter
when a father removes himself from his vital constructive
role in the family by escaping through substance abuse. It
is about the journey of addiction that turns everyone close
to him into some version of crazy and how the resulting single
parent becomes overwhelmed trying to take care of what is
necessary. It is a saga of how that situation twists healthy
motherly instincts into overly protective enmeshment and
codependency, fostering the mother’s addiction to shame,
denial, and guilt. It is a chronicle of a mother’s attempt
to maintain appearances and expectations for her children,
trying to do it all in an attempt to salvage what is left
of the family only to discover that it is not the right thing
to do. Its also a story about the confusion of trying to
understand how children can de-emphasize their own significant
accomplishments, instead emphasizing their sense of loss
when a mother is unable to provide the care, attention and
hugs usually present in a two parent family. It is a description
of a loss of balance that is understandable, but defies rational
explanation.
Every parent who has intervened when a child starts to make
negative decisions can find at least a little of themselves
in the author's story. Every parent who has ever worried
about how their children will turn out will find this book
helpful, even if only as a reminder that, "There, except
for the grace of God, go I."
Politicians, community leaders, educators, child care professionals
and those who think and talk in global terms and spend billions
of dollars "For the Children," would be well served
by reflecting on this story of one parent's chaos. Hopefully
it will cause them to ask themselves, “What kind of society
are we building that not only facilitates the obstacles this
mother had to struggle against, but often also condemns her
for being a poor parent? How can such a negative, destructive
and unfair judgment be justified by her children's behavior?
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